Joy Bimal Roy was only nine years old when his mother took him to Beirut, accompanying her filmmaker husband Bimal Roy to the International Film Festival, in September 1964. In his book Ramblings of a Bandra Boy, Joy recounts colourful details of his first trip abroad, including the post-box red T-shirt actor Shammi Kapoor wore on the flight and his huge fan following in Lebanon. With no babysitter to look after Joy, his mother lugged him along wherever she went. From nightclubs in Beirut to Jesus’s birthplace in Bethlehem, the nine-year-old certainly got exposed to a variety of experiences!
Replete with vivid descriptions, Ramblings... is a compilation of pithy Facebook posts about people, places, incidents and a whole host of other things that Joy has encountered in his chequered life.
Though born in Bombay and brought up in its charming suburb of Bandra, Joy is a Bengali to the core, which was very visible at the launch of his book. The typical Mumbai audience comprising film stars, theatre artistes, journalists, photographers, costume designers, art collectors and others were treated to a typical Bengali jolkhabar, of kochuris and cutlets, after theatre doyen Denzil Smith and writer Nandita Puri read out side-splitting extracts from his book.
While Smith brought the house down with his animated narration of Joy’s hunt for w**d-seller Riyazbhai in the shady bylanes of Mahabaleshwar, Nandita read out an entertaining piece about Joy’s faux pas when a glamorous film diva landed up, unannounced, at his cottage one early morning, in lycra shorts and T-shirt, and huskily “looooved” everything she saw.
The book has Joy knocking down many a star from their pedestal, with almost childlike candour. The brattish kind, the pretentious ones, those with selective memories become the butt of his snarky humour.
His travails through the corridors of the entertainment industry, first as an assistant to filmmaker Shyam Benegal and then as an executive with HMV, had him witnessing the one-upmanship, naked ambition and dangerous liaisons of the glamour world upfront, and he exposes it for what it is. Despite his roots as the son of a legendary filmmaker, Joy never quite fitted into the world of grease paint and arc lights.
This is his strength as a writer. Marching as he does to the beat of a different drummer, Joy tends to stick out as a square peg in a round hole not just in the film industry, but in many other situations as well. His travel escapades, for instance, are seriously funny!
Once, while rushing through the maze of London airport, to catch a connecting flight to New York, he is accosted by a security official who asks him a routine question: “Are you carrying any sharp instrument?” Instead of a routine reply, the harried Joy snaps, “If I were doing that, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?” Of course, the official is not amused.
No-nonsense security officials, insecure stars, filmmakers past their prime, insensitive ICU staff, cooks with minds of their own, a boss who croaked like a frog with a sore throat, and even ghosts... a vast array of characters, whom Joy unmasks with deadpan humour, populates Ramblings...
But he is also very appreciative of genuinely good people. The towering music composer from Assam, the late Bhupen Hazarika, who drove the Roy family around Guwahati in a rattling Ambassador, is described with warm affection. As is matinee idol Shashi Kapoor, who struck up a conversation with Joy in the gents’ loo at Rabindra Sadan in Calcutta during a filmotsav. Neither of them had any airs.
Uncles and aunts at whose homes Joy spent memorable holidays also have a special place in his heart. Recalling one such holiday he spent at his mother’s twin sister’s home in Calcutta, when he was five years old, he writes about his mesho sweetly cutting his overgrown fingernails and making steaming cups of egg flip for him. “Even at that age, I was taken aback. I had no idea any father did this... I wondered why my father never did anything like this,” states the son of the renowned filmmaker.
There are delightful vignettes of a bygone era when bookshops and candy counters provided immense joy to children, when romping in the garden with cousins meant hours of fun, when watching movies at the local theatre with loud overhead fans was a treat to look forward to. Simple times, simple pleasures, which Joy remembers nostalgically.
Food pops up frequently in this book. From his mother’s malai chingri to his moody cook’s jhinge posto, there are pages and pages devoted to exotic meals. Calories and cholesterol, needless to say, don’t merit a mention.
A minor crib: some of the stories require dates. That apart, Joy’s musings are just what the weather bureau would recommend for a rainy day. With piping hot khichuri on the side.
